Color printers have become very popular. Previously, such printers were mainly used only for professional purposes, since their cost could run into the thousands of dollars. Professional artists and entities concerned with printing color images and documents on various types of media had at their disposal high-end printers that could generate very life-like color prints. More recently, however, the cost of color printers, including laser printers but more usually inkjet printers, has plummeted, resulting in their purchase by home users and other non-professionals. With the advent of applications like digital photography, such low-cost color printers are increasingly being used to print color prints of photos, computer-drawn images, and other types of documents. Improvements to printers have thus generally focused on increasing the quality of their output, and decreasing their cost.
An inkjet printer is more generically a fluid-ejection device that ejects fluidxe2x80x94the inkxe2x80x94onto media, such as paper. A typical inkjet printer usually has a number of common components, regardless of its brand, speed, and so on. In particular, there is a print head that contains a series of nozzles used to spray droplets of ink onto paper. Ink cartridges, either integrated into the print head or separate therefrom, supply the ink. Most inkjet printers today eject ink by using a drop-on-demand approach, which forces a droplet of ink out of a chamber thermally or mechanically. The thermal method is used by some manufacturers, in which a resistor is heated that forces a droplet of ink out of the nozzle by creating an air bubble in the ink chamber. By comparison, the mechanical approach employed by other manufacturers uses a piezoelectric element that charges crystals that expand and jet the ink onto the media.
A flexible circuit, also known as a xe2x80x9cflex circuit,xe2x80x9d may be used to convey information and electricity from within the printer to the print head, and more particularly to an ejection die that is responsible for ejecting the ink onto the media. The ejection die thus learns by way of the flexible circuit how it should eject the ink onto the media, so that the resulting printed media is in accordance with a desired document. Traditionally, the ejection die has been connected on both ends by the flexible circuit, where the circuit typically extends over or around the ejection die.
However, having the ejection die connect on both ends by the flexible circuit, where the circuit extends over or around the ejection die, serves a useful function in that it provides a substantially flat and continuous capping surface. This surface interfaces with an elastomer cap in the printer that is used to provide a humid environment to minimize drying of ink within the nozzles of the ejection die. This capping surface incidentally acts to protect the die, when a wiper wipes ink from the ejection die, as well as in other situations. Therefore, there is a desire for the present invention.
An embodiment of the invention relates to a capping shroud for a fluid ejection device. A fluid ejection assembly may include the fluid ejection die and the capping shroud. The capping shroud has an aperture therethrough and surrounds the fluid ejection die. A top surface of the capping shroud is substantially flush with a top surface of the fluid ejection die.